Citizens United

The Supreme Court, as expected, has today overruled some of its key precedents on campaign finance reform. As I indicated in an earlier post, I like that result, but that hardly qualifies as analysis. I’ll leave that to Rick Hasen and others who know way more about this than I do.

I do want to make one observation about the decision. In Footnote 16 of his dissent, Justice Stevens points out that the narrow grounds for decision rejected by the Court in Citizens United are as plausible, if not more plausible, than the creative statutory reading that the Court adopted to avoid addressing the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in June. I think that is clearly correct.